January 2011

Corn being so important to Americans, it is hardly surprising that it turns up so often in our art. Indeed, the Tulsa artist, Alfred Montgomery, whose painting opens this story, seems to have painted little else but corn—in baskets, in sacks, on a floor, arranged on a barn door. An admirer claimed that Montgomery painted corn so perfectly that “horses try to devour it, hens even peck at his canvasses.”

Although Montgomery was unique in his zealotry, many other artists also found corn—from spring planting through summer ripening to autumn harvest—an attractive subject, as the following portfolio of paintings suggests.

In 1892 a couple of local boosters, Louis Beckwith and L. O. Gale, decided to build an exposition hall in the fast-growing town of Mitchell, South Dakota. Their purpose was to “provide a place for the display of products of the rich Dakota soil.” They were ingenious men, and they devised an ingenious plan for displaying the region’s prime crop: they would make the building out of it. The hall, with its fairy-tale façade totally encrusted with corn, was such a hit that it had to be rebuilt larger in 1905, and again larger (and more fireproof) in 1921. Each summer now, the Corn Palace is redecorated, requiring two to three thousand bushels of corn, grain, and grasses—in their natural colors—and dozens of workmen, such as those at right, who apply the materials in elaborate patterns to wooden panels. More than half a million people visit the splendid structure every year.

Rarely do I address the AMERICAN HERITAGE audience directly—that’s the editor’s job—but a lot of mail has come my way lately, and I want to take this opportunity to reply. This mail, of course, was generated by our difficult decision to switch from our traditional hard covers to flexible covers. The continuing rise in printing and paper costs and postal rates forced us to face some hard choices: we could reduce the quality of the magazine itself by using cheaper paper stock; we could publish fewer articles by notable contributors and fewer illustrations; we could increase drastically the subscription price; we could do away with the hard covers.

No magazine is wiser than its readership, and so we decided to share that choice with you. Some months ago we sent out a survey to a scientifically selected sampling of readers. This had a twofold purpose: along with testing your feelings about the shift to flexible covers versus greatly increased price, it would let us know better what sort of people read A MERICAN H ERITAGE .

Every September, the citizens of Northfield, Minnesota, put on a civic extravaganza. It includes men’s and women’s arm wrestling, a beard contest, a softball tournament, an arts fair, an antique collector’s show, a kiddie parade, a drum and bugle corps, the Minnesota Street Rod Association Show, a beer garden, several dances, and a Grande Parade (which two years ago featured a team of live llamas and Miss Pork Queen of Rice County).

Above all, it includes several reenactments of a very special moment in the city’s history. For Northfield is the town that defeated Jesse James.

On the morning of September 7, 1876, Frank and Jesse James, Cole, Bob, and Jim Younger, and three lesserknown thugs rode into Northfield intent on making a withdrawal from the farming deposits kept in the First National Bank on the corner of Bridge Square and Division Street. The attempt was a bloody disaster.

As we reported in the “Letter From the Editor” in our February/March issue this year, many of the citizens of Boston were at loggerheads with the Smithsonian Institution throughout 1979. At issue was the fate of the famous Gilbert Stuart portraits of George and Martha Washington, owned by the Boston Athenaeum since 1831 and on display at the Boston Museum since 1871. In 1978, the Athenaeum, fallen upon hard times, put the paintings up for sale; the Smithsonian, wanting to place them on permanent display in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, agreed to pay $5,000,000; concerned Bostonians, led by General James M. Gavin, declared it improper that the portraits should leave Boston and attempted to raise the money to keep them there.

As his biographer Robert Conot has pointed out, some of Thomas Alva Edison’s most important inventions were serendipitous offshoots of research into something altogether different. Thus, experiments in the development of a musical telephone led to the phonograph, work on a zootropic device to motion pictures, and chemical research for an automatic telegraph to the mimeograph. “If I had not had so much ambition and had not tried to do so many things,” he said shortly before his death, “I probably would have been happier, but less useful.”

Which is not to say that things always worked out. Take the cement business, for example. In 1897 Edison developed a new process for concentrating iron ore in a mill he built outside of Ogdensburg, New Jersey. One of the by-products of this operation was an extremely fine sand, which the mill’s manager had no trouble selling to those engaged in the making of Portland cement. Well, Edison reasoned, why not go into the cement business himself?

Peter Andrews, a reader and contributor (see “Delmonico’s—The Restaurant That Changed the Way We Dine” in this issue), has written to take exception to a statement in our “American Characters” feature for April/May, 1980: “It said that in 1892, Brady badgered John L. Sullivan into a fight- when he ‘hadn’t fought in six years.’ Not so.

“In 1886 Sullivan bested Frank Herald in two rounds on September 7 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania; put away (for the second time) former heavyweight champion Paddy Ryan in three rounds on November 13 in San Francisco; and fought a four-round draw with Duncan McDonald on December 28 in Denver.

“In 1887 Sullivan held off Patsy Cardiff in spite of a broken arm and fought him to a draw in six rounds. Later the same year, he sailed for England and participated in more than fifteen nontitle bouts in the British Isles.

Several months after his death, a letter was addressed to Brace Catton, founding editor of this magazine, from Jeffery Sherrill, a seventh grader from Social Circle, Georgia. William B. Catton, Bruce’s son (and co-author with him of The Glory and the Dream ), answered the young man’s letter and was kind enough to pass along the correspondence to us. Portions of both letters follow:

“Dear Mr. Bruce Catton:

“I admire you for your Civil War books. I have five of them. When I was young I loved the Civil War more than anything ! I always looked at your books the most. I tried to write my own book about the Civil War but I got to the First Bull Run and quit. If I finished I said I would dedicate it to you. The title was The Silver Book of the Civil War . …

William Saroyan …

In “Turn Back the Universe and Give Me Yesterday,” the Pulitzer prize-winning playright ( The Time of four Life ), novelist, and short-story writer revisits his hometown of Fresno, California, through a cache of recently discovered photographs of the town as Saroyan knew it in the teens and twenties.

Emily Hahn …

This celebrated journalist, novelist, and biographer has written about everything from China to Leonardo da Vinci. She now turns her talents to a subject much in the news today: gold—specifically, a great treasure salvaged from the sea off Cape Canaveral, Florida, detritus from the wreck of a great Spanish fleet in 1715.

Justin Kaplan…

by Donald Dale Jackson Alfred A. Knopf Illustrations and maps 361 pages, $13.95

The California Gold Rush was not only a scramble for riches; it was also a national adventure. It had its anthem—“Oh, Susanna,” in dozens of cheerful and raucous versions—and its own terminology. Those taking the interminable sea routes to San Francisco referred to seasickness as “casting up accounts.” And when a forty-niner had endured great hardship, and learned from it, he had “seen the elephant.” For several hundred thousand young American males, the thought of missing the adventure was intolerable. “A man had to go, to take part somehow, lest he wonder forever what might have been,” Jackson writes.

There was plenty of gold to be had in 1848. In fact, to fail at the mines that year “required an extraordinary combination of ineptitude and bad luck.” But few of those who came in the next two years went home with bulging gold sacks, and many died of cholera before they ever got to the gold fields.